No Fear in the New School Year

I recently wrote a post where I gave 25 pieces of advice to incoming freshmen. Now that the start of the school year is getting closer, I thought I would share more advice that is relevant to the first few weeks of school for both incoming freshmen and returning students. Enjoy!

Attend fun events during your first few weeks to meet new people.

2017 at USC will be amazing. Why? Because it’s the grand opening of the USC Village! I recommend you attend the Grand Opening Celebration, which is after New Student Convocation, on Thursday, August 17 at 11:00 AM.

In addition, the Viterbi Luau is one of the best places to meet other engineering students. Even though I attended this event two years ago, I remember it clearly because I had so much fun. Some of the people I met at New Student Convocation and the Viterbi Luau are still my friends today.

Be sure to support the football team on Saturdays as well!

Lastly, during the first few weeks of school, many clubs will hold meetings dedicated to getting to know each other. Attend the Involvement Fair during the first week to see what kinds of clubs you want to join. Here is a piece of advice for your Involvement Fair scavenger hunt:

Do what you love, not just what will boost your resume.

As you walk around the Involvement Fair that hosts hundreds of choices of clubs to join, stay true to who you are and what you love to do. Companies don’t expect you to have everything figured out immediately. Don’t join the accounting society just because you think it will look good on a resume (unless you actually love accounting, of course!) because recruiters will see through the fact that you joined a club just to please them. If you love to play the trumpet, then join a group for that. If you enjoy hiking, check out Peaks and Professors. Joining a club to follow your passions will show companies that you are a unique individual rather than a cookie-cutter undergraduate student. Also, doing what you love brings me to my next point…

It’s important to start taking care of yourself as soon as school starts rather than feeling the stress midway through the semester and not knowing how to handle it. Here are some recommendations I have:

Meet Beau, USC’s wellness dog! He is the first wellness dog on a college campus. How cool is that?

Take group fitness classes at the Lyons Center. Class cards give you unlimited classes and are only $85 for the entire semester.

Start a decent sleep schedule at the beginning of the semester. I recommend the app SleepTown to help you start a good sleep schedule for the semester. It helps you wake up and go to bed at the same times each day. If you successfully wake up in a certain timeframe, you get coins to build a town on the app!

It’s okay to fail.

The start of a new school year calls for opportunities to try new things. When you try something new, failure is inevitable.

Remember, it’s okay if you try something out this year and you don’t end up liking it. You will never know unless you try! One of my favorite sayings is, “The biggest mistake you could ever make is to be too afraid to make one.”